Month: April 2021

Apricots

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In your diary,
you’ve drawn little apricots
with faces: smiling, laughing apricots,
melancholy apricots–
little Spartan apricots driving
little Persian apricots off
black Greek cliffs.

On page 63, your daily apricot
is missing, and I like to think
he is off on some adventure,
lost in the labyrinthine underbelly
of hospital sprawl
your passage describes.

Every apricot in June shrinks,
sketched in fainter penstrokes:
ragged apricots until
the cusp of July
and a final apricot.
Ghost-eyed, half-formed,
he is staring up at me,
but no longer seeing.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Apple Core, Hourglass

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These cords keep her from splitting,
wound round and round,
over breast and under breast
and back and forth across
belly flesh and lumbar curve,
settled down over hip swells,
pelvic bone.

Fibers, fibers,
crosshatch and diamond braid,
a texture for every inch of pale flesh:
weight of the knot here,
lark’s head, wound back upon itself.

There is newfound strength
in corseting and constraint:
apple core, hourglass,
trunk of the oak tree, wheat sheaf,
bound under the cleanest sun.
Even concaved, she is radiant.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Anchoring

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If I had hollow bird bones,
you’d find me
in the corner,
filling them with buckshot.

Oh, I still want to fly.
Far up, higher
and higher
until blue air thins
and lungs catch fire
for scarcity

but you know
I’d never
come back down.

Weigh me here
with heft,
with burden,

crow’s feet
that never leave
the earth.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

An Oyster Meets Aphrodite

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She lies against the curve of the sea’s hip,
clothed only in sand.
and never before have I envied
crushed quartz,
but I envy the dust that supports her.

When the tide thieves it away,
I shall drink one of those graced grains.
I’ll pack that sedimentary sentiment
into my shell.
I’ll study it well,
though it burns my tongue.

One day,
a suitor with a shallow knife
will cut her from me,
just to admire her beauty.

Were I he,
I would do the same.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

After Homelessness

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The shapes of a small woman’s bones
twist on an empty isolated floor
and I wonder if she still inhabits them –
if the girl that flesh was made for
still yearns for the pleasure of
making love to sunlight and rain,
for the unexpected bliss of
hearing her own heart beat
in the silences of stolen breaths.

The stepping-stones of her ribs
wear the ghost light of seclusion
more than they wear
the vital membrane of her flesh;
I want to paint with my fingers
the parts of her that have lost their color:
her stepping-stone ribs, the lone hip,
the single ear defined only
by the shadow it casts in the light.
I want to paint them
in the messy radiance
of warmth and invitation.

I want to give her one bright flower
to wear in the valley of her shoulders.

I want to give her a poem
and a candle to read it by.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Acorns

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As the sun sets,
old mother oak tree
shakes the rain
from her limbs
and stretches her
roots down and down.

On the ground below,
all her tiny little children
with brown round caps
snuggle down into
the softest earth
and dream of the leaves
they’ll have one day.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Threads

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From time to time,
when you have wandered
away from a person,

you wander a little further
and feel the slightest tug
at your ankle.

Looking down, you find
a thread, red or maybe
blue, barely seen,
barely there, tied

gently and trailing
as far back as you
can see and you know,
instinctively, where
it leads.

It brings you to a choice:
to take one more step,
snap the thread and
leave it where it lay,
or return from whence
you came.

Sometimes, the one’s
the best choice;
sometimes, it’s the other.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Hammers and Nails

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I think you learned to love people
by watching hammers love nails

You bury them in succession
one after another after another
and you never expect them
to get back up.

Some do, of course.
It takes them years.
Decades, sometimes, but
they wrench themselves out
of the holes you put them in
with their heads still smarting,

so you go back.

You love them down again. Harder.
You put all your weight into it,
just to make sure.

I know what will break you.
One day you will love someone
and they will go crooked.

You will love them
and they will twist at their shank.
Bent over, hunching their back,
they’ll take you on their spine
and let you hit as hard as you like.

They’d rather be mangled
than hidden away.

What will you do
with a love like that?

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Teething

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Forget all else I have told you.

There is no calm inside me,
no serenity
no silence.

I have told you
I have nothing more to say
but I do
I do
and it comes out
only in wails at myself
when I get away from you.

I have hidden what I am:
a teething child

snapping at tombstones
and bricks.

I have chewed a box of knives
down to their handles,

gnawed curbs and sidewalks
for the taste of the moss in their cracks
and the feet that tread them.

I have ground my teeth down
to a mouthful of grit
and bloody nubs of gum.

I polish the back of my throat
in swallows.

Even that brings no quiet.

Call a dentist, please
please please.
Build me
a new grin with pieces
of chalk.

I was born with
a blackboard tongue
that needs scrawls
bitten into it.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Postcards

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Today, I found
a shoe box
under the bed,
full of post cards
sent to you
from people
who loved you.

Postcards from a gas station
in downtown Paris,
from a smoky Amsterdam pub,
from a little village an hour
from Sao Paolo
where the water is drying up
and the children
have eyes like coal.

Handdrawn artsy cards,
five dollar museum cards,
art deco cards, cubist cards,
dada cards you have to stare at
until you start to think of them
as something beyond paper.

Kitsch cards, sentiments,
and Hallmark rhymes,
and a dozen cards sent
from some marina tourist shop,
the same sparkling blue water
and the same white sailboats
and the names of so many
little coast towns.

All these cards,
and on each, scrawls,
“I wish you were here.”

I never sent you a postcard
from anywhere. I never
wanted to be anywhere
you were not.

Oh, I wish you were here.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.